How The UAW Stands Athwart Automotive Innovation

DETROIT, MI - MARCH 25: United Auto Workers President Dennis Williams arrives to speak to delegates at the UAW Special Convention on Collective Bargaining at Cobo Center March 25, 2015 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

Labor Day is a holiday to honor organized labor's achievements, but this year the United Auto Workers (UAW) union doesn't have much to celebrate.

But the UAW is nothing if not persistent, and it has now set its sites on other automakers, suppliers to the auto companies, and any other potential revenue streams. The targets are new, but the tactics are old and tired: They include complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, pressuring employees to sign union authorization cards, home visits as unwanted as a visit from a vacuum salesman, and public pressure campaigns waged via political allies and the press.

It's a 20th-century approach to organizing the workplace that's as stale as the 20th-century work rules that impede competitiveness and creativity.

Consider the UAW's 2007 master contract with Ford Motor Company. The encyclopedic document spanned five volumes and exceeded 2,200 pages in length; that's 22 pounds of paper. As my former colleague J. Justin Wilson wrote at the time, "those 2,215 pages don’t include much regarding efficiency and competitiveness." Rather, the union contract was larded-up with hundreds of workplace rules and one-off letters of understanding that made it near-impossible to run an agile, profitable company. (For comparison purposes, consider that the UAW's original master agreement with Ford Motor Company was 24-pages long.)